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On KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt talks to Edmund White and his husband, Michael Carroll, about their recent books.

John Green

Sarah Polley will be writing and directing an adaptation of the YA book Looking for Alaska, by John Green.

The June/July issue of the Atlantic Monthly is out. In an article about the effect of autocorrect on punctuation, Joe Pinsker quotes a linguistics professor who points out that the devices that are usually blamed for corrupting conventions may, with the autocorrect function, ultimately be responsible for preserving them. Meanwhile, Sarah Boxer writes about the dead-mother trope in animated children’s movies. “Mothers are killed in today’s kids’ movies,” she argues, “so the fathers can take over.”

Also at the Atlantic, read Part 3 of Ta-nehisi Coates’s “narrative bibliography” accompanying the long, excellent article, published last month, in which he makes a case for reparations. In the bibliography, Coates explains that what was most disturbing in the books he read was the overwhelming evidence of intent: “Government policy toward African-Americans is not an argument for the ineffectuality of government, on the contrary it is an argument for just how effective government can be.”

A survey suggests that journalists today check their facts after publishing their stories instead of before.